Cold War Broadcasting

Impact on the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe

Edited by A. Ross Johnson, R. Eugene Parta

Publication Year: 2010

The book examines the role of Western broadcasting to the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe during the Cold War, with a focus on Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty. It includes chapters by radio veterans and by scholars who have conducted research on the subject in once-secret Soviet bloc archives and in Western records. It also contains a selection of translated documents from formerly secret Soviet and East European archives, most of them published here for the first time.

Cover

Title Page

Copyright Page

Table of Contents

Preface

Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty were, along with other Western
broadcasters, effective instruments of Western policy during the Cold
War. Previous studies have examined the history and organization of
RFE /RL and its place in American national security strategy. Major publications
include...

Foreword

In a tumbledown farmhouse in the poorest corner of south-eastern Poland,
at the height of the Solidarity revolution of 1980-81, I met a farmer
who had just sold some home-weaved baskets in order to buy a radio.
He had bought it to keep himself informed about the...

Introduction

Part One of this book, “Goals of the Broadcasts,” reviews the origins and
development of RFE and RL , and the complementary development of
the Voice of America. These chapters were written by participants in the
events described.
The subsequent sections were provided...

Part 1: Goals of the Broadcasts

Since the liberation of Eastern Europe and the collapse of the Soviet
Union, the effectiveness of Radio Free Europe broadcasts has never been
questioned. Testimony on the impact of the broadcasts has come repeatedly
from the new leaders...

Chapter 2: Goals of Radio Liberty

Aleksandr Herzen wrote from London in the 1850s: “There is no place
for freedom of speech at home—it can be heard elsewhere. I remain in
the West only to begin free Russian speech, to set up for Russia an organ
without censorship...

Chapter 3: The Voice of America: A Brief Cold War History

The Voice of America, the nation’s only government-funded global
broadcaster, has been on the air more than six decades. It has served listeners
during World War II , the Cold War, the immediate post-Cold War
period of unprecedented geopolitical...

Part 2: Jamming and Audiences

Chapter 4: Cold War Radio Jamming

On the night of November 21, 1988, shortly after 9 p.m., I received a call
at my home in Munich, Germany, from operators at the RFE/RL Technical
Monitoring and Receiving station at Schleissheim, a northern suburb,
reporting that Soviet...

Chapter 5: The Audience to Western Broadcasts to the USSR During the Cold War: An External Perspective

Survey data on Radio Liberty’s audience during the failed coup in August
1991 was available within days of the event. It showed widespread
listening to the station. (A survey carried out a few weeks after the coup
by Vox Populi, a leading Moscow research...

Chapter 6: The Foreign Radio Audience in the USSR During the Cold War: An Internal Perspective

The attempt to influence populations through broadcasting in national
languages was just one episode of the so-called Cold War between the
USSR and the West, especially the United States. In 1947 the Voice of
America started broadcasting...

Chapter 7: The Audience to Western Broadcasts to Poland During the Cold War

The purpose of this paper is to examine the audience to Radio Free Europe’s
Polish Service from the 1960s to the early 1990s. The paper includes
and compares data from three sources: external surveys with travelers
conducted by RFE ’s audience research department...

Part 3: Impact of Western Broadcasts in Eastern Europe

Chapter 8: Radio Free Europe in the Eyes of the Polish Communist Elite

Radio Free Europe played a complex role in Polish elite politics. In the
process of providing Poles with information about the realities of life and
politics their media did not report, it served as an alternative source of information
for the Polish elite...

Chapter 9: Polish Regime Countermeasures against Radio Free Europe

Over more than four decades of existence, the Communist system in Poland
underwent a significant evolution, but throughout the period, from
the beginning of the 1950s until the end of the 1980s, one of the permanent
enemies of the system was...

Chapter 10: Radio Free Europe’s Impact in Romania During the Cold War

Emil Constantinescu, President of Romania from 1997 to 2000, spoke
those words in his prepared remarks during an official visit to Prague
in the spring of 1997, a few months after his inauguration as President.
His metaphor may seem overreaching...

Chapter 11: Ceauşescu’s War against Our Ears

If censorship can be defined as “the knot that binds knowledge and
power,”2 then the secret services established under communist regimes
provide the best illustration of censorship at its being most distorted and
pathological. Although complete state...

Chapter 12: Just Noise? Impact of Radio Free Europe in Hungary

E. H. Gombrich, one of the most influential art historians of the twentieth
century, who was at one time director of the Warburg Institute in
London, worked as a so-called monitor and later as a monitoring supervisor,
between 1939 and 1945 at the...

The impact of RFE ’s Bulgarian broadcasts falls historically into three distinct
phases, and so, by extension, do the countermeasures taken against
the station. During the first period (1950s–1960s), the broadcasts proved
relatively ineffective in influencing...

Part 4: Impact of Western Broadcasts in the USSR

Chapter 14: Soviet Reactions to Foreign Broadcasting in the 1950s

In spite of the extensive literature on the history of foreign broadcasting
in the Soviet Union, the Soviet response to foreign radio transmissions
has not yet emerged as a focus for scholarly analysis (except for the topic
of jamming, examined in detail most...

Chapter 15: Foreign Media, the Soviet Western Frontier, and the Hungarian and Czechoslovak Crises

Evaluating the impact of foreign broadcasts and publications is a tricky
pursuit for those who seek to influence the course of events in an opponent’s
country, and the impact of Cold War broadcasts to the Soviet
Union is not always easy to measure. This essay discusses Soviet...

Chapter 16: Water Shaping the Rock: Cold War Broadcasting Impact in Latvia

Each of the Western broadcasters played a role in the battle of the airwaves
that took place during the Cold War. Before RFE /RL began broadcasting
in 1975 (initially as part of Radio Liberty, later as part of Radio
Free Europe), VOA was the only major...

Part 5: Conclusions

Chapter 17: Cold War International Broadcasting and the Road to Democracy

This volume assesses the impact of Western broadcasts to the USSR and
Eastern Europe during the Cold War based on evidence from Western
and Communist-era archives and oral history interviews. External and internal
audience surveys...

Part 6: Documents from East European and Soviet Archives

This section contains translations of documents from East European and
Soviet archives concerning Western broadcasting during the Cold War.
The documents make clear that the Communist regimes perceived “enemy”
broadcasts as a serious threat...

I. Regime Perceptions of Western Broadcasters

In 1977 the hostile propaganda against the People’s Republic of Bulgaria
remained almost unchanged in terms of quantity. The broadcasts
in the Bulgarian language continued from 10 radio stations from the
capitalist countries...

II. Regime Countermeasures against Western Broadcasters

The representatives of the intelligence organs of the PRB, HPR, GDR ,
PPR, USSR and CSSR , who met on 12–13 February 1976 in Prague exchanged
experience on active measures, both completed and in preparation,
against the centers...

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